Purposeful Planning:

Retail Quick Wins for a Successful Q4

Achievable retail quick wins to boost holiday outcomes and key considerations for your capability roadmap and long-term success

As we approach the 2024 holiday season, retail faces a blend of opportunities and challenges. Consumers are already shifting their focus to holiday shopping, with 61% planning to spend more than $600 this year, despite ongoing concerns over the increased cost of essentials like food and fuel. Further, NRF forecasts winter holiday spending will grow between 2.5% and 3.5% over 2023 to between $979.5 billion and $989 billion. Inflation may be cooling globally, but tight budgets mean a sharper focus on deals, value, and promotions for many households. This economic tension is already driving early shopping behavior, with 37% of consumers starting their holiday purchases and events like Amazon Prime Deal Days, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday set to dominate the season.

Despite the predicted holiday consumer spending, retailers must be cautious. Global uncertainty and high costs for essentials mean that strategic retail planning is more critical than ever. Brands must focus on retail quick wins and revisit their capability roadmaps to maintain customer engagement while managing costs.

As we head into the busiest season, addressing key operational challenges and focusing on retail quick wins will be essential to finishing the year strong and preparing for 2025.

CONTENTS

Opportunities for Retail Quick Wins

Preparing for Longer-Term Initiatives

Getting Started

Opportunities for Retail Quick Wins

Granted, most retail buys for the holiday 2024 season are long in the books. Supply chain processes involve external partners who cannot turn on a dime. The execution of store processes and staff deployment are at the mercy of your existing environment.

But there’s hope. Retailers can still implement some quick-win opportunities to help safeguard a successful season. Here are some recent retail quick wins Parker Avery helped our clients identify and navigate:

Within four weeks, we conducted over 30 store visits and identified quick wins for a global jeweler, covering labor reporting and workload planning, compensation changes, and simplified SOPs. The retailer is immediately implementing these recommendations to ease burdens on its store management team and improve efficiencies.
Our analytics team’s Enterprise Intelligence-driven markdown optimization engine recommended a specialty retailer’s optimal SKU-specific markdowns, enabling expected multi-million dollar increases in sell-through and total revenue while improving margin and reducing excess inventory at the end of the Halloween season.
Our store operations team helped a major military exchange retailer design new, efficient in-store merchandise flow processes and implemented store staff training to solidify the new ways of working.
Our retail consulting team has helped several major retailers quickly streamline their business review and reporting processes, tools, and cadences for more efficient, data-driven decision-making.

Quick wins are small, targeted actions that deliver tangible and relatively swift results.

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Preparing for Longer-Term Initiatives

Retail quick wins should be incorporated into your overall capabilities roadmap. The roadmap is a strategic tool that outlines the necessary skills, technologies, and processes a retailer needs to acquire or enhance to achieve its goals. It considers the prioritization and strategic sequencing of initiatives, including retail quick wins, as well as medium and long-term undertakings.

We have helped many retailers and CPG companies develop capability roadmaps. Recent considerations include:

Technological Advancements

Leading retailers quickly embrace technology that improves planning capabilities, enhances the customer experience, and streamlines operations. For instance, implementing order management systems (OMS) or new assortment planning capabilities with built-in AI and analytics to react quickly can significantly impact a retailer’s ability to cater to the influx of customers no matter where or how they shop.

Agile Operations

Flexibility and organizational agility are key during peak seasons. Developing capabilities that allow quick adjustments to strategies based on real-time data and market insights is crucial. This could involve implementing agile decision-making processes and cross-functional collaboration. We have often found that reassessing and redesigning business processes and weekly meeting structures (participants and agendas) has resulted in extreme efficiencies and better decisions. We encourage our clients to go fast but mitigate risk with a backup plan. Waiting until things are fully baked to try new working methods will leave you further behind.

Data Governance and Analytics

In today’s data-driven world, brands must develop capabilities that enable more effective gathering, maintenance, and analysis of customer and demand-related data, including master data. It is paramount that retailers implement solid data governance structures and processes to ensure the data used for AI, analytics, and other systems is of good quality and consistently monitored. Good-quality data results in more accurate demand forecasts, relevant and personalized marketing campaign design, and the ability to anticipate consumer preferences effectively.

Strengthen your data governance muscles by reading: The Expert Guide to Data Governance in Retail.

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Supply Chain Optimization

Retailers must enhance their supply chain capabilities to handle the increased demand and supply fluctuations. This often involves improving inventory accuracy across all locations (DCs, stores, and in transit), enhancing collaboration with suppliers, and implementing efficient allocation, replenishment, order fulfillment, and returns processes.

Sustainability Initiatives

As consumers become more environmentally conscious, integrating sustainability into a retailer’s capability roadmap can be a strategic differentiator. Many of our clients are exploring ways to reduce their environmental footprint, such as sustainable packaging, energy-efficient practices, and responsible sourcing.

Employee Learning and Development

From the front line in the stores to the planning and merchant teams, a retailer’s workforce plays a pivotal role in executing strategic plans. Investing in modern learning and development programs throughout the organization drives significant improvements in ensuring employees are equipped to handle the seasonal rush, provide exceptional customer service, and uphold the brand’s vision and mission. Further, improving learning and development programs across the retail enterprise has immense power to strengthen employee loyalty and retention.

Let’s make sure your roadmap supports your long-term vision.

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Getting Started

The key to effectively leveraging retail quick wins lies in their swift execution and continuous monitoring. Develop a clear plan for each quick win, assign responsibilities, and set measurable goals. Track and evaluate the outcomes to assess their impact on KPIs, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency. Then, refine as needed. This iterative approach allows a brand to make necessary adjustments and refine capabilities based on real-world experiences.

Crafting a roadmap is just the first step in driving stronger capabilities. Implementation is where the rubber meets the road, and quick wins can help you achieve success while building your organization’s ability to deftly handle change.

At The Parker Avery Group, we understand the urgency of preparing for these seasonal shifts. As a trusted advisor to top retail and consumer brands, we help retailers develop tailored capability roadmaps that drive meaningful outcomes. Whether optimizing inventory to meet localized demand, implementing AI-driven insights, or improving in-store processes, our expertise ensures you’re ready for the critical retail moments ahead.

Don’t wait for a misstep this holiday season. Contact Parker Avery today to explore retail quick wins that can help you capitalize on consumer spending, address cost concerns, and create a seamless customer experience. Together, we’ll set your organization on a path to success through the end of 2024 and beyond—just in time for NRF’s Big Show in January 2025.

Learn more about our roadmap approach and navigate your path to success: Retail Capabilities Roadmap Development.

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